Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The PowerPoint slides for the program "Catalogers Today: Skill Sets, Expectations and Challenges" are now available on the OBS website at:

http://www.aallnet.org/sis/obssis/meetings/2010/index.htm

Many thanks to the speakers, Dr. Sylvia D. Hall-Ellis and Stacey L. Bowers, for their engaging presentation. The Q&A portion was also interesting, so I encourage all to listen to the audio if possible.

Friday, July 16, 2010

For facebook members who are interested in RDA news and views. A facebook group has begun and already has nearly 200 members in just a few days.

The menu offers a unique selection where you'll find collegial chat and help in a wide variety of flavors. The main course, of course, is Resource Description and Access, with desserts being related RDA standards---- later will be offering side dishes about LC policy statements, plus any OCLC stuff on the flip side of the menu.

If you don't have a facebook account and haven't found a reason to have one, this is it. It takes a few minutes to create an account. After that, just do a facebook (fb) search under RDA Cafe.

Having signed on for the free access period for the RDA Toolkit, I made one of my goals for AALL in Denver to find out as much as possible about RDA so once back home I could begin to use it. THANKS to all of you who both provided information and provided the forums for sharing this information. I have a better understanding, but as Ellen expressed in her recent post, there are still many things to be figured out. Now back home, I am reflecting on what I saw and heard. My reflections at this point:

--I was encouraged about the degree of openness (along with anxiety, etc.) to RDA which I observed

--I hope that this rollout of RDA will be a transition period leading to more dynamic way of showcasing our resources

--I agree with Hillman and Coyle (The Semantic Web and RDA) that we need a networked environment bringing together information from different sources allowing people to interact with and use the information

--I hope that the younger generation of technical services librarians will have the vision to get us to that point

-- Right now I am thinking about more mundane things like will we need to do reindexing of our ILS in order to download and display the new fields? How will the RDA records display in the catalog? Will it be a steep learning curve? How about the load tables for our shelf ready books?

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

I get the vision of where we are going in terms of the semantic web, RDA, FRBR, etc. Believe me, I want to be there as much as anyone. But I still cannot for the life of me understand how we will get there. To paraphrase Janet Swan Hill, I need the intervening steps mapped out and I do not seem to be hearing those. Or else, I am missing them, which is entirely possible ...

Thanks to Georgie Briscoe for her interesting program on quality control in our catalogs! Hopefully we can pursue Barbara Bintliff's suggestion of a new column in TSLL to share our strategies for cleanup projects to catch the errors that Georgia described to us. Look for her article on her research project in an upcoming LLJ.

It was exciting the way the program Q&A portions often produced ideas like this that tech services law librarians could tackle to achieve a desired end. My concern is whether we have the time and energy to make them all a reality. After all, the themes I heard this year remained: budget and staff shortfalls, cross training, justification of what we do to administration (usually in terms of measurement of data), etc. And of course it is the year of RDA, so we are wondering how to grapple with that. How little sleep can tech services law librarians operate on? I guess we will find out!

The meeting was exhausting because there was so much content to absorb in such a short amount of time. I extend my sincere thanks to TS and OBS for their hard work in providing that content. And thanks especially to my committed and enthusiastic colleagues who make up those SISs. You are all amazing!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The TS-SIS silent auction is now over. It raised over $200 for the Marla Schwartz Award. Thanks so much to Katrina Piechnik for contributing her amazing fiber and ceramic objects to the auction, and to thinking up the auction in the first place. (You can see the pin I won on the left!)

Attending an interesting program given by Carol Avery Nicholson and Karen Davis on making an institutional repository for faculty made me realize I should also have gone to the program, 10 things every law library needs to now about copyright. Luckily, there's a live webcast of it here.

Monday turned out to be an almost all-day RDA fest. And by the end, I was exhausted ... I came away with more information about changes associated with RDA and the testing process, but the level of uncertainty remains very high. My concern now is how my ILS will handle the RDA records that are possibly appearing in OCLC even as I type this. Thank you to our colleagues for informing us about RDA!

The snafus surrounding the Cat & Class events at the Hyatt makes me wonder: What does the Hyatt have against law catalogers? I hope George Prager got a good night sleep after his busy day on Monday :-)

High tea at the Brown Palace was a welcome oasis in the middle of a long, info-packed day.

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Technical Services Special Interest Section

The Technical Services Special Interest Section (TS-SIS) of the American Association of Law Libraries promotes the communication of ideas, interests, and research which concern acquisitions, cataloging and classification, preservation of library materials, serials control, and other traditional areas of technical services and supports the development and coordination of the country's law library resources, in all type and sizes of libraries.

Online Bibliographic Services SIS

The Online Bibliographic Services Special Interest Section (OBS-SIS) of the American Association of Law Libraries focuses on all aspects of the various national and local bibliographic utilities. These include public access to bibliographic data online, acquisitions sub-systems, mail message systems, and integration of circulation systems with the online bibliographic data.